this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Never? Rockefeller literally bailed the entire US government out of debt.
I'll not put too fine a point on it and assume you meant "in the modern US," as it's trivial to point out how many times we've had a greater wealth disparity historically and globally.
But even then, we used to literally have company towns that amounted to debtors prisons and any attempts to organize were met with firebombings.
It's not good now for sure, but it's far from the worst it's ever been.
It's not the worst it's been, no. And yes, the post was about the USA so that is what I am referring to. Living conditions have been worse but specifically the difference in monetary wealth is greater now, unless I have been misled.
That is true, but in the end, it's largely irrelevant. The incidence of poverty matters infinitely more than how large the gap is between the wealthiest and everyone else.
If hypothetically, not one person in the US was pulling down a penny less than $75k/year, that'd mean no one's broke, right? And yet the size of the wealth gap would basically be identical, because the difference between $0 and $75,000 is nothing compared to the difference between $0 or $75,000, and hundreds of billions.
Over the past 100 years, the number of (inflation-adjusted, of course) billionaires per capita in the US increased by a whopping 7x. And yet, poverty was MUCH worse in 1925 than it is in 2025. Also, iirc, there is a positive correlation between average standard of living, and billionaires per capita, in a given country.
Eradicating poverty is the thing to aim for, but directly. And, despite the very common misconception, reducing the wealth of the wealthiest people (especially considering that the majority of that wealth is newly-created valuation, not actual money) will not move the needle toward that goal, at all. Too many people think wealth is a zero-sum thing, and assume the gap being wider than ever must mean that those not at the top have less than ever—that's simply not true.
I feel like I'm listening to Margaret Thatcher explain trickle down economics....
More billionaires means better standard of living for everyone! Stop hating the rich! Redistributing their wealth will make us worse off! [citation required]
That's because you're deliberately misreading/twisting it, as exemplified immediately below.
Straw man, I didn't assert any causal relationship. I actually did the literal opposite; I refuted someone else's assertion of a causal relationship by pointing out a lack of positive correlation between the incidence of billionaires per capita, and that of poverty in the populace.
If I pointed out that the rise of Internet porn does not correlate with a rise in committed rapes, that's an effective counterargument to someone claiming that porn consumption increases the incidence of rape, but it's not equivalent to me asserting that porn reduces rape.
But I have a feeling you're intelligent enough to understand this; it's just that your bias has clouded your judgment, and you're willfully turning that part of your brain off, because you've decided I'm the Bad Guy, and being the Good Guy is more important to you than being accurate/honest.
You can hate them if you want, I just pointed out that it's not useful to, and that doing so won't do a thing to lift anyone out of poverty, which should be the actual goal. Loving the poor is a better use of your time than hating the rich.
Citation required for me having said that, you mean, since, you know, I didn't. Liar.
I'm BARELY paraphrasing you. My exaggerations of your statements are so slight they're nearly direct quotes.
You speak like an LLM that was asked to respond as Friedrich Hayek fighting to defend the free market against socialism: convincing and yet devastatingly incorrect.
You're not exaggerating, you're straight up fabricating. By equivocating "reducing the wealth of the wealthiest people …will not move the needle toward [eradicating poverty]" and "Redistributing their wealth will make us worse off!", you've done the equivalent of taking me saying
"Eating oranges will not cure a cold"
and turning it into an accusation that I said
"Eating oranges while you have a cold will make it worse"
Absurd. Either your reading comprehension and/or understanding of fundamental logic are seriously lacking, or you're just a disingenuous jerk. Which is it? There are no other possible explanations for an error this basic.
Maybe you mean Morgan?